The Beginner's Guide To Making Business Cards

We know brands everywhere are finding new, innovative ways to come up with their own beautiful marketing materials—which is exactly why we’ve been working so hard on a little surprise for you. Check out these beautiful new business card templates and go ‘oooh’:

In honor of these stunning new templates, today we’re going back to the basics to give you our guide on how to make your very own business cards for free using our graphic Designer Toolset.

Once you’ve got your template in place, you should start thinking about how you want your design to come together. Some cards are more simple and pattern based, while others may incorporate great company shots into the business cards themselves.

2. Choose your background

After you’ve given a little thought to the layout for your new business card, the next step is selecting a background. You don’t want it to be too “busy” so that it detracts from your messaging. I usually find mine by heading over to a stock image site like Pixabay and searching for ‘texture’ or ‘background’, ‘background image’, etc, but you can always take things a step further and make your own stock images, too.

Here are a couple of backgrounds I found on Pixabay that I love (I keep a folder on my Google Drive for these at the ready, so whenever I need to make something I like I have a neat little folder of images to choose from):

Watercolors are always a great choice.

Textures like brick and wood always look simple, yet elegant. You can also give them a “distressed” look by using different effects like the Vintage Colors filters or the Paper or Scratches textures, too.

Pro Tip: You can totally make your own double exposure photos like this using the Cutout Tool and Layer Manager. Just find your background photo, cut out the silhouette of your topmost layer, add it on and adjust your blend mode.

Once you’ve settled on a background image, you can delete the background layer in your template by selecting it and hitting delete.

3. Add in your background

Head over to the Layer Manager on the right hand side of the toolbar. This is where you can store any images you’ll be adding into your design. Upload your background from your desktop, your BeFunky account, Facebook or even Pixabay.

From there it’s as simple as dragging and dropping your background image:

It’s time for resizing! Drag the arrow to change the size of your photo until it fits. You can also hold down the Shift key for a freeform selection and can edit your image in the Photo Editor at any time by selecting ‘Open Image in Editor’.

In this case, we’re going to want to move our image back so it’s not covering up your text, so hit the ‘Move Backwards’ button under Image Properties until all your text is visible:

4. Decorate!

While I like the background image here, the text doesn’t quite stand out. Let’s go in and distinguish it a little. I’m choosing to add in a simple rectangle behind the text just to help it stand out.

Head over to the Design Elements section and select a rectangle from the Shapes section:

Once you’ve selected your image, drag and drop it into your design. You can choose a color by selecting Color Overlay (or even choose a custom color by using our Color Picker as shown below), adjust your opacity, blend mode and more.

I chose a complimentary color with the Color Picker and turned my opacity down to 90, then hit ‘Move Backwards’ until all my text was visible.

You can also edit your text and play with fonts here, too. Just click on the text to edit everything from your font type to color, size and more. Choose from our mighty library of fonts, or upload your own snazzy fonts to use.

Save your image to just about anywhere including your computer, Google Drive, Dropbox, and even Facebook. And if you’d like to save your design so you can come back to it later, be sure to check out the handy Save Project feature.

You can go in and make your card as fancy as you like (and if you’re looking for an extra fancy route, check out these luggage tag business cards). Add in some graphics, throw in some more text, upload your brand logo or edit your image in the Photo Editor to create something truly beautiful—either way, we can’t wait to see what you come up with!